Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Nihilism
In the podcast “In the Dust of This Planet” they mention that “nihilism is the basic credo of cool”. The definition of nihilism is “extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence”. I think that since our society is so obsessed with post-apocalyptic and the dystopian society, I think that nihilism is also a huge part of pop culture. Nihilism has been a thing since the 1800’s and still is very popular. For example, shows and movies like “the Walking Dead”, “the Giver”, and “the Hunger Game”. I think that it influences our society to think that its “cool” to believe that nothing in this world has a real existence since movies highlights the negatives in society. I think that being pessimistic/ negative is pretty much the same thing as being nihilistic. When someone doesn’t think that the world has a real existence then there’s no point in being positive since the world isn’t existent. Nihilism is everywhere whether it’s in music, tv, social media. In the podcast it talks about how Eugene Thacker’s book was shown in a popular music video by Jay-Z, or can be seen in shows like “True Detective”, and they don’t even know that it’s nihilism.
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I agree that nihilism is very potent in society. In contemporary society, the ones that are most influenced is the younger generation. Movies, fashion and novel ideas are all rooted from the idea of nihilism. I believe that it is so frequently displayed because in itself, the idea of nihilism, as you said is reality. Society is being taught by the media that life is, unfortunately, shitty. As written by a Russian philosopher, Turgenov, “We base our conduct on what we recognize as useful, in these days the most useful thing we can do is to repudiate…so we repudiate everything.” Through this quote it is shown that society, as looking through a nihilistic perspective, can give meaning to their meaningless lives by refusing the idea that the world is okay.
ReplyDeleteI agree, in the pod cast they realize that “It’s not that I don’t give a s#!t, Its I’m not afraid”. This is a great example on how we as people think that this after civilization, this post-apocalyptic world is so cool and everyone in it is so bad ass. When at first it was just for the Goths who were pessimist, their culture soon spread, so that now the non-mainstream has become the main stream. These ideas that I’m not afraid of dying and I’m cool because of it has become so big in the last few years that you cannot watch tv without seeing this idea repeated. They also explain in the podcast that things use to be much simpler, that you could point the finger at whatever was causing the problem, but now everything is creating problems, which makes the ability to be very vague about what you not afraid of which in turn makes you able to connect or be “cooler” because of it.
ReplyDeleteI strongly agree that nihilism has a huge impact on society as we know it today. It seems like out of nowhere most newly popular things have been built on a nihilism structure or at least have had some sort of pessimistic view in it. Journalist and media analyst Brooke Gladstone observed “cycles in which the sense of meaninglessness comes out in sharper relief then other times but you can identify them over and over again.” She is saying that pessimistic thoughts like this have always been a part of our society but popularity rises and falls only at certain points throughout time. It seems like this kind of thinking is really targeted towards the youth of society and also has the biggest affect on their daily life. It is thought to be cool for younger people to not really care about anything or always have a bad outlook on life.
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